Fox are to be the new home of WWE's SmackDown television show from October 2019 onwards. The deal is reportedly for over 1 billion dollars, meaning that Fox is putting a great deal of trust and faith in the show. However, of recent times, SmackDown viewership has been failing to even match, let alone beat the ratings for it's "rival" show Raw on Mondays.
If WWE are to help boost SmackDown's ratings, They may have to consider breaking it's newly rebuilt and established rosters and have one mega roster as before that appears on both SmackDown and Raw to help the ratings on the latter show. If this happens, WWE would suffer greatly, as the reason the duelling brands were brought back was due to bad ratings, so would WWE risk possibly going back into a ratings slump on both shows in order to keep the billion Dollar TV deal with Fox? It's a question of how much WWE prefers its fans over big money deals.
What would it mean for the stars of WWE?
The way I see it, there are two ways that WWE could salvage the duel brands and their championships that they have introduced. One way is, They could still have all the titles from both brands but just have one big roster that can compete for both. Or, They could get rid of one of the brand's championships and just have WWE Championships instead of Raw Championship or SmackDown Championship etcetera, that would just be defended on those shows instead of actually belonging to the shows. This would mean less opportunities for the stars as the number of belts would be reduced, and considering the sheer size of the WWE's main roster, not including those that are ready to jump over to the main roster from NXT, it would be a very long time before for every star could get a shot at the championships.
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